Border disputes

Last week an editorial in Country Life magazine, warning against the over- development of Kent, said that "England's Scottish rulers need to wake up to the growing anger and despair of English voters at the destruction of the English countryside". A few pages further on, the magazine's Agromenes column spoke of the danger of "taking for granted one of the greatest of gifts - to live in England and to be an Englishman ... the first prize in the lottery of life". It wouldn't be wise to take Country Life as the barometer of national feeling, but something is up. As the defender of English interests, David Cameron is exploiting the West Lothian question to Gordon Brown's disadvantage, and English people seem to be at least mildly interested. Perhaps England really does have "a Scottish government" and there really is a "Scottish mafia". There are certainly a lot of Scottish accents on the radio and television - Wark, Marr, Naughtie are only the most long-serving and prominent.

The last time Scotland made such an impression on British and English life - or at least the last time it had such an irritant effect - was probably soon after the beginning of the 20th century. The three largest political parties were then led by men who were Scots in one way or another. Lord Rosebery, whose slogan, interestingly enough, was "Educate, educate, educate", led the Liberal League, the pro-imperialist Liberals who had split from their party. He had a big house outside Edinburgh (but then he had big houses everywhere). Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the leader of the Liberal party itself and therefore of the opposition, was the son of a Glasgow lord provost. Arthur Balfour, the Tory prime minister, came of an old landed family with estates in East Lothian.

As for the press, it was infested with them. In the view of TWH Crosland: "In Fleet Street, if you do not happen to possess a little of the Doric, you are at some disadvantage in comprehending the persons with whom you are compelled to talk. 'Hoo arre ye the noo,' is the conventional greeting in most newspaper offices." Crosland wrote that in his book The Unspeakable Scot, published in London in 1902. In Scotland, the book became notorious; I remember my father mentioning it 60 years later as "silly rubbish". It got up the Scottish nose, just as Crosland intended. England, he wrote, was "a Scot-ridden country". There were far too many of them in journalism, in politics, in commerce and banking: "in the general atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon business life there is a persistent feel of him". He was all very well as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, "but in matters where intellect and wisdom are required he should be left severely alone". The time had come, Crosland wrote, "for the Scotchman to be taught his place".

Scots on the make in England had been objects of satire since the Act of Union, but in Crosland's relentless, patronising irony the game of Scot-baiting reached its pinnacle of unpleasantness. Reading his book now, you can only wonder that some Glaswegian sub-editor didn't take him up a Fleet Street entry and do a Zidane on him. What had got Crosland's goat? Or who, to be Scottish, had stolen his scone?

The likeliest answer is the Scottish influence on literary journalism. Crosland was a "bookman". In John Gross's excellent study of bygone literary life, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Crosland is mentioned as the "obnoxious henchman" of Lord Alfred Douglas when they were briefly at the helm of the Academy magazine. The Academy's great days were just over. It had done best under the ownership of Pearl Craigie, the daughter of an American tycoon who'd bought it for her as a present. She pinched an enterprising editor, Lewis Hind, from the Pall Mall Budget. Hind didn't know much about literature, but he knew what to do. He serialised Arnold Bennett's youthful 1903 autobiography, The Truth About an Author, and put on sales.

Cheap populism was, in Crosland's view, the hallmark of Scottish literary taste. "Taking him all in all, the Scotch critic is a good deal of an anomaly," he wrote. "To criticise is scarcely the Scotchman's forte, his chiefest gifts lying rather in the direction of admiration, particularly of admiration for whatever is Scotch." The undeniable fact, however, was that Scottish critics had played a disproportionate role in English literary journalism ever since the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. Many were household names in any household that read books: Andrew Lang, William Archer, the Rev George Gilfillan - in a society where books mattered as the only source of intellectual entertainment, where dozens of literary magazines came and went, men like these were the Warks, Marrs and Naughties of their day.

The Scotsman Crosland especially hated was William Robertson Nicoll, a Free Church minister from Aberdeen who became the first editor of the nonconformist British Weekly and founded the monthly Bookman. Writing under the pseudonym "Claudius Clear", Nicoll influenced British book-buying and reading habits as no reviewer has done before or since. John Gross quotes a contemporary of Nicoll's: "He praises a book - and instantly it is popular. He dismisses one gently - and it dies." He also filled his papers with endless columns of gossip and publishing PR. He was, in other words, a booster. Or as Crosland put it: "Any author who is doing well ... may always reckon on a large hospitality in Dr Nicoll's journals, and will always find Dr Nicoll and his merry men beaming round the corner and hat in hand."

And so, from a Scottish perspective, we have the conclusion. TWH Crosland toiled in Grub Street as a bitter and disappointed man. If - an unlikely prospect - Hollywood were to make a film of this period in Anglo-Scottish relations, he'd make the ideal villain, like all those English nancy-boy sadists in Rob Roy and Braveheart. There he sits, spitefully checking the proofs of his unsuccessful magazine with his colleague, Lord Alfred Douglas, who got Oscar Wilde into all his trouble. Gloss over the fact that Lord Alfred was also Scottish in one way or another. The racist case rests.